Ras Moshe Burnett & Dafna Naphtali – Fusebox

released digitally May 21st, 2021

Ras Moshe Burnett – tenor saxophone
Dafna Naphtali – electronics & live sound processing, voice

Fusebox is a recording of free and structured improvisations with live sound processing performed by the duo of Ras Moshe Burnett (soprano & tenor sax, flute), and Dafna Naphtali (voice, live sound processing). The album showcases the collaborative language that Dafna & Ras have built over sixteen years as collaborators.

Central to their dynamic is Dafna playing her unique technical setup as a flexible musical instrument, while maintaining an intense physical connection to churning polyrhythms, using sound processes and her self-made computer programs to create extended tonalities and timbres that encompass both the acoustic and electronic expressions of sound.

This long overdue debut recording was created live in studio in 2017. On album opener “Hall of Mirrors”, as in many of the tracks, Ras and Dafna finish each other’s sentences, anticipating each other’s melodic ideas, and meet each other with surprises, speaking in one voice. “Astrocyte” starts as what could be a hymn or a jazz standard – contemplative melodies are suddenly enveloped in a celestial electroacoustic veil. This approach is revisited in “Coded Futures”, but mixed with a stronger dose of no-input feedback, as increasingly pure sax melody becomes part of the electroacoustics.

“Stochastic Leap” jumps headlong into a full stratosphere of extreme timbres and the energy of free playing, anchored in delay-soaked stilted rhythms and jagged feedback constructed from the acoustic lines. “Hamsa”, the final track of the album, is a hymn for protection, almost presciently recorded in 2017 as music and hope so needed in 2021.